“Football isn't just 22 players kicking a ball around,” says David Squires. Sky Sports. “That's all there is. humor, life, war, pandemics, soft and hard power, geopolitics. It's all going down. My challenge is to make eight funny jokes out of each week.”
It is a challenge that Squires has accepted over the past ten years, becoming a renowned football cartoonist, with the name 'the king of the football comic strip'. And that's why his new book, covering his work from 2018 to 2024, is worth checking out.
“A lot has happened in six years.” Throughout, Squires has captured the zeitgeist, mastering humor and pathos. “I wanted a mix of funny and serious subjects.” That has been key to his success since Twitter helped launch his career a decade ago.
“For all the sick, I don't think I would be able to do the job without social media. It gives a good sense of what people are talking about. I owe my career to Twitter. Guard I saw my work first and that's where I got most of my news.”
In addition to his weekly column in the Guardhis work is featured in the German magazine 11 LAWS and a French establishment The Team. It has been a win but with the self-deluded air of a man living a childhood dream, he still fears being found out.
“Every time I hit send on a Tuesday, I'm sure it's the last one and they're going to sack me because it's not up to standard. If they take longer than usual to get back to me, I think. they have a meeting to figure out how to tell me I'm fired.”
Now 50 and living in Australia since 2009, this lifelong fan of Swindon Town – “my editors limit me to one Swindon cartoon a year” – has taken an unusual path to take up his current position. He even remembers his first chance to blow a creative career. Because of football.
“When I did work experience at 15 in Italia '90, my school organized me to go to this graphic design studio in Swindon. Good opportunity. I was sure I wanted to go to Radio Rentals. I knew I could watch group games on the wall of televisions.”
He went back. “They sent me to the service center. The only TVs I saw for a whole week were the broken ones.” But he did work in the West Ham ticket office. “I was the youngest professional worker at the club and Neil Ruddock and Paolo Di Canio were there at the time! he stopped.
While Squires says he was “moving” during that period of his life, there was still room for his creative side. “I designed their awesome Hammer mascot. That's on my CV forever.” The Premier League continues to provide supplies.
If you are even a fan of the cartoons, you will know the series of characters, the ones that are hilariously flashing over the years. From Pep Guardiola to Jurgen Klopp, from Mikel Arteta to, perhaps most memorably of all, Jose Mourinho.
His retelling of Mourinho as an emo teenager certainly struck a chord. “He looked so stupid and miserable. He reminded me of a cheeky teenager. I put him out there with the emo look and this fringe over his top,” he explains.
“People ask if I'm a fan but I missed it by a generation. So I scour Wikipedia for emo bands quite often. I think I've almost get tired of it.” But his Mourinho vision was renewed. “I draw him like Elvis in his later years, just playing the hits. “
Arteta is still a Lego man but that has been updated as his character unfolds. “The photographs that really work have the essence of their true personality. That can take time to reveal itself. You just need a little nugget of thought and build from there.”
When Arteta brought pockets into a pre-season team meeting to help encourage his players to improve their awareness, it was a gift. Others such as Arne Slot, could take more time. “He seems very optimistic. We'll see what happens when they don't win.”
Ruben Amorim? “Like Erik ten Hag before him, you can play on him by being upset. Amorim's face when Ed Sheeran entered the interview, for example.” The dream is that they will become classic characters such as his memorable look at Roy Hodgson.
“I think I could draw Roy Hodgson from my memory, using just a few lines,” says Squires, reflecting that as a photographer he would spend a week looking over a picture but with such short deadlines, he had to master the picture. art to work much faster.
“Of course, I know I can because I tried to recreate Roy over a beer on a picnic table for the sports editor, James Dart, when I was in London recently. Just through repetition, I know the angle of Roy's nose, the way it cuts back to his upper lip and then his chin sticks out.”
It does not expect any request for a signed copy. “Roy is not on the phone very often, thankfully. But a relative of Louis Barry contacted us asking for one. And a friend of his showed Roy Keane his cartoons once. “The bravest thing I've ever heard anyone do. “
For all the sense of fun in his work, he also deals with the saddest stories. “My natural instinct is always to try to make a joke about anything. It's probably very annoying to everyone around me. But it's the those who praise I keep away from humor.”
More recently, he has covered the deaths of the two Charlton brothers. “Jack Charlton had a lighter moment or two that really reflected his life. He was a funny man.” With Bobby, a different approach was required because of the Munich air disaster.
“Bobby Charlton had an amazing life with this amazing life-changing moment. It was always sad for him. I wanted to show that.” It is a moving cartoon. And yet, even here, when he remembers one of his most poignant pieces, Squires has a story.
“It ended with the screen fading to white to reveal the Munich snow and also his fading memory, his life fading away. The printer phoned me a couple of days later and told me that I had mistakenly left the last panel blank. it didn't land with everyone.”
Squires' work lands with more than enough people to keep doing this for a long time to come.
Chaos in the Box: Chronicles from Modern Football, published by Faber, out now
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